‘‘Genius,’’ E.B. White wrote, ‘‘is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.’’ Judging by how many of my possessions are chipped, broken, worn, bowed and burned, it’s apparent I’ve invested in his odds. It’s not a popular attitude — certainly not in cookbooks, where kitchens often seem embodiments of sunny, enameled perfection — but I hold to it. I was particularly glad recently to open the cookbook ‘‘This Is Camino,’’ by Russell Moore and Allison Hopelain, the owners of the Oakland restaurant Camino, and find in its pages a catechism for my crackpot ways.

‘‘Until now,’’ the introduction explains, ‘‘we’ve had nothing written down, even dishes we make repeatedly,’’ because ‘‘on some level, every meal here needs to feel like it’s being made for the first time.’’ The reason is that keeping formulas away ‘‘wards off a certain rigidity that can creep into a kitchen.’’

I stopped there at first, and relished the surprise of it: perfect replication seen not as a measure of success but as an invasive pest, to be beaten back. Then I read the book thoroughly. And I found that a key to cooking the way they do at Camino — to making dishes you might eat at their tables — is an embrace of the defects and deficiencies that abound by sheer serendipity in home kitchens, unless they are warded off by mistake.

The first thing to be embraced is the likelihood of the unexpected. Normally, cookbooks in which restaurants tell their secrets are full of advice for averting crises, guarding against error, making dishes fail-safe. But here you find courtship of the unpredictable, and ebullient descriptions of the pleasures that come from facing the strange and unknown. Every other week at Camino, a whole pig arrives, without anyone knowing its size, which can vary ‘‘up to a hundred pounds.’’ Neighbors deliver herbs ‘‘randomly, and in unplanned quantities.’’ Moore buys only fish caught nearby, not purely for ecological reasons but also for the pleasure of navigating the constraint: ‘‘Life’s just more fun that way.’’

The next truth to welcome is that responsibly grown food will be remarkably expensive unless you can make each part of each ingredient sing for its soup. Because Camino tries to ‘‘use up the seemingly unusable parts of vegetables in order to get the most out of them,’’ it is hard to make any one recipe in the cookbook without also making some of another. At the bottom of a recipe for Pounded Herb Sauce on Page 14, there is this: ‘‘Note: The herb stems can be used to make Egg Tea (see Page 164).’’ A few pages later, a recipe for a vivid scarlet beet soup (included here) calls for the liquid saved from the ends of batches of sauerkraut. There is a recipe for mashed beets, one for carrot salad, another for grilled chicories and then an herb-jam recipe that includes ‘‘beet tops,’’ ‘‘carrot tops’’ and ‘‘outer chicory leaves.’’ Egg yolks become ice cream, egg whites become meringues and eggshells are saved and filled with confetti for New Year’s. ‘‘Nothing is wasted,’’ notes Chris Colin, a co-writer of the book. ‘‘Orange peels are gold. Yogurt containers are Tupperware. Broken pots aren’t discarded but used to hold fire tools.’’

Much of the culinary advice of the book might be boiled down to a subtle, persistent recasting of problem as opportunity. The complications of home cooking — ingredients getting old or running out, schedules getting mixed up, money running short — are versions of the same fortuitous spurs to invention that make Camino work so well. If you’re not looking for things to be perfect, you can see more of what’s there.

In the book, one anecdote in particular illustrates the incandescence that can be born of dealing in immediacies instead of idealizations. ‘‘In the Piedmont region of the Italian province of Cuneo,’’ the story begins, ‘‘there’s a small village called Verduno, and at the top sits a magnificent eighteenth-century castle. ...’’ Moore, brought there to cook dinner for luminaries, found that the best place to do his cooking — of pigeons and fish stew and focaccia and potatoes — was on a makeshift grill he assembled of grape wood, bricks and oven grates. There he cooked in the dark, by penlight. He writes, happily: ‘‘I never saw the inside of the castle.’’